There should be no Computer Art (1971)
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Starfighter
She is in the photo at the terminal working on the last starfighter.
She has been creating computer art ever since. She has often expressed confusion and disillusionment with the field. She is often unsure if she or the computer is the artist.
Nearly all art except singing and dance is made with tools. In many cases tools define the art form.
Singing can certainly use tools too. Auto tune and special microphones.
Perhaps you mean to say that neither require tools.
Not just electronic tools: archictectural acoustics are often a tool in vocal performance.
It, of course, didn't exist until after robots were invented because no one would recognize it as that. Even more interesting, when e.g. a dancer makes it look like s/he's "moving backwards." We as humanity couldn't really concieve of that until we saw e.g. film actually run backwards.
Recently I was watching some beatbox battles, similar deal. I kind of like them less these days because I prefer when they imitate/get inspiration from acoustic or other "older" instruments, but now the majority of them are imitating, e.g. bass synths and EDM type stuff.
Did she really say that? As a moonlighting digital artist, I feel like this is the same thing as a painter saying they’re not sure if the paintbrush is the artist. Maybe if I wanted a full time art career I should have leaned into it and fostered the dramatic narrative of the computer having intent. God knows there are a bunch of artists who actually know better say lots of stupid untrue stuff that anthropomorphizes computers, and they enjoy a lot of attention for it. I think this hyperbolic ghost in the machine crap is very short sighted and has influenced public opinion much for the worse.
Artists are undermining their own efforts and talents and spreading misinformation about what computers actually do when they tell the story this way. More importantly, they are undermining the efforts and talents of all artists, specifically of digital artists who don’t want to take part in the computer-as-artist narrative. I’ve stood next to my art at a gallery show and had people walk by and say out loud something like “ugh why is this here? this crap is just made by a computer”. I don’t expect people to understand how I use the computer, but the bias and lack of curiosity is pretty sad, and my computer was neither artist nor collaborator. It was a tool that I used to achieve a vision I had, the same way I use a paintbrush to make pictures.
We could talk about who made the tools, whether it’s a paintbrush, a camera, or computer hardware and software. There’s a Grand Canyon of space for credit that various other people might deserve, in between the artist and the art made using a computer. Jumping to the conclusion that the computer did anything on it’s own and deserves attribution is to be unintentionally (or sometimes intentionally) ignorant about what a computer is and what it does.
It may have been in the 90’s if that makes it more credible for you.
Not sure I understand what you mean about being hung up on “artist”. That’s the word you used. Do you want to suggest an alternative? Do you mean that Shelley did feel like the artist, and the computer meant something else to her?
Your very short story seemed to me to fit a pattern and language about digital art that I’ve seen many times elsewhere. It’s very common for people to say something very similar about computers being collaborators in the art process, rather than being what they are: inanimate tools, made by other people. I’m sorry if it it’s not really what you or Shelley meant.
This is non-sensical. You hold the paintbrush and move it across the medium with your own hand. It is entirely within the artists control. With a computer, you tell it what to do and within it's own constraints, be that p5.js or an llm whatever algorithm will produce some result.
When you use the pencil tool across the screen in photoshop, it works just as a pencil on paper.
The difference is not so clear as you imply.
When using a wacom tablet, using the pencil tool in photoshop is very similar to using a pencil. You're "instructing" the pencil tool to move by moving the pencil controller with respect to the tablet.
I know AI slop art when I see it, and I have no interest it making or "consuming" it. But I don't think I could construct a robust definition that would stand up to adversarial scrutiny.
Shelley Lake did not use p5.js nor an LLM for The Last Starfighter, and I didn’t use either of those things either. She may not have written the software she was using, and generally speaking I do write the software. I don’t know that it matters who writes the software, but it does make it easier to diffuse artistic credit if you use complex tools you don’t build yourself. I have done quite a bit of both physical painting and digital art and in both cases I’m deciding what gets done, designing the outcome, making the tools myself, and like a paintbrush, the computer doesn’t participate in any of that. The computer is just as much a tool as a brush, and is no more an artist than the brush is.
LLMs are brand new to art, they are not relevant to the top comment of this thread, and in terms of provenance of an image they are not understood by the public yet. I don’t feel that you’ve offered any clear thinking about how to attribute images produced using an LLM. It would be best to leave them out of the discussion for now, but FWIW they don’t change the calculus of computers vs intent and attribution much, they only muddy the water due to humans making all the training data.
I wrote the program that creates that. When I wrote it, my goal was to make a procedurally generated gas giant planet of some sort, but I didn't even know if what I was attempting would work (and for a period of about a month, it didn't work). I had/have only rudimentary control over the output. I can control the colors that go into it. I can control, to some degree, the scale of the "swirliness", but not the details of the swirliness. I can control how long I let the "swirliness" progress, and a few other things. But, I never know ahead of time how it's going to come out, and it's hard to escape the obvious fact that the computer has done nearly all of the work, and I only gave it the vaguest of directions in terms of aesthetics, although I did give it very specific instructions about how to do everything it did, those instructions were so complicated and so many, that I had next to no idea what specific output those instructions might produce, except in the most general terms. When I run the program, there's an anticipation ... "oooh, I hope this one comes out good!" but I don't know ahead of time whether it will or not.
You picked the subject matter and setup the camera and shading. You designed the software UI. You decided what level of control you wanted, and you can add more control if you want. I understand you’re using procedural rules and randomness, but that was your intention, and so the story that you don’t have control and don’t know what it’ll look like when run seems to me contrived at some level.
One of my main digital art projects centers on artificial evolution, which is notoriously difficult to control; I am deeply, intimately familiar with what you’re talking about, and I still say emphatically the computer is not the artist, I am, especially when I write the software. In a digital art project, the software is part of the art. You’re framing your control in terms of what happens only between starting up the software you wrote and getting one output image, but for some reason leaving out all the control and intention you exercised writing the software and deciding what kind of procedural pictures you wanted.
There’s a whole category of art called “generative art” that isn’t about computers specifically, but started long before computers existed, and is about setting up and releasing a system of rules, whether physical or logical. Generative art relies on some level of randomness, and the resulting artifact is rarely predictable. And yet, it is still deterministic. The rules might be complex, but the only intention comes from the humans involved who establish the rules, and then let them execute, and hold up the output as art.
Noticing the machine does the labor isn’t very relevant, IMO. Cars do a ton of complex work while driving with only vague directions, but we don’t anthropomorphize them, not seriously anyway. Knitting machines do all the complex work making clothes, but clothing designers don’t talk about collaboration with the machine, nor give design credit to the machine. Printers and copiers are very complex, but nobody waxes philosophical about them being collaborators. Just because an image might come out different every time a program runs that was designed to produce a different image every time it runs doesn’t make the machine an artist, it only shows that the computer is a useful, powerful, and reliable machine.
whether it’s a physical or digital medium the artist is expressing their creativity and manipulating the tools to realize that vision.
Throughout art history people have often not valued the new, but only the existing. Beaux-Arts de Paris in the late 1800's was the premiere art school in Europe training traditional artists; yet many eventually turned to impressionism, etc. and abandoned the old styles. I do "computer art" today and go in directions that are new. If all you do is what came before, everything including art will stagnate. Evolve or die is not just for biology.
People create with what is at hand — this includes ideas, not just physical media. In my opinion, suggesting there is society-wide progress (or lack of it) in art is silly, like suggesting the same for fashion or cooking. Exploration, technical evolution, yes. And progress in ideas, in society? Of course!
The question about Egyptian art is more difficult than it seems. Almost all the artifacts are the ones that could survive 1,000s of years and is quite sophisticated. What we don't get a good sample of is woodworking which is much easier to manipulate. The difficulty of stone work has a built-in limiting factor.
The Egyptians also had Ptah the god of creation.
Examples of new things that were criticised and rightfully not adopted include the "metaverse" or even chemical warfare.
> This leads to Eliot's so-called "Impersonal Theory" of poetry. Since the poet engages in a "continual surrender of himself" to the vast order of tradition, artistic creation is a process of depersonalisation. The mature poet is viewed as a medium, through which tradition is channelled and elaborated. He compares the poet to a catalyst in a chemical reaction, in which the reactants are feelings and emotions that are synthesised to create an artistic image that captures and relays these same feelings and emotions. While the mind of the poet is necessary for the production, it emerges unaffected by the process. The artist stores feelings and emotions and properly unites them into a specific combination, which is the artistic product. What lends greatness to a work of art are not the feelings and emotions themselves, but the nature of the artistic process by which they are synthesised. The artist is responsible for creating "the pressure, so to speak, under which the fusion takes place." And, it is the intensity of fusion that renders art great. In this view, Eliot rejects the theory that art expresses metaphysical unity in the soul of the poet. The poet is a depersonalised vessel, a mere medium.
> Great works do not express the personal emotion of the poet. The poet does not reveal their own unique and novel emotions, but rather, by drawing on ordinary ones and channelling them through the intensity of poetry, they express feelings that surpass, altogether, experienced emotion. This is what Eliot intends when he discusses poetry as an "escape from emotion." Since successful poetry is impersonal and, therefore, exists independent of its poet, it outlives the poet and can incorporate into the timeless "ideal order" of the "living" literary tradition. [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tradition_and_the_Individual_T...
No really. For example, you have political art, conceptual art, and topical performances that, while interesting, soon become irrelevant and likely won't float on top for very long. Likewise, many past excellent artists disappeared from the museum chart, so to say, and periodically resurfaced.
Tell me the importance of a x1SjelifbOoo. It's not important because it has no importance.
Value, in this way, is formed by way of merit; of doing. That which fails to be valued greater or equivalent to another is less valuable, and lesser than another.
This anecdote demonstrates how completely misunderstood new technologies can be. Such accuracy is completely irrelevant to an artist.
In the end the thing that ‘converted’ me was getting my hands on a copy of Photoshop. I was then, and remain, unimpressed by its painting tools. However, I was blown away by its ability to penetrate the surface of a photo - to change the facts of that photo. Effectively, this solved a creative problem I did not even know I had.
I honestly believe that tools are invented before tool users.
I remember coming across a livestream of someone whose line-making process was to zoom in and scrub over a tiny area repeatedly for several minutes to create the effect of a single ink brush stroke. The effect was pleasant and had a very intentionally designed quality to it, but I came back a few hours later and he had made hardly any progress. The goal he had in mind was really better suited for vector tools, but the machine wasn't stopping him in the way that paper would give out under intensive scrubbing. I'm quite sure, extrapolating that anecdote, that there's someone out there trying to intentionally design each pixel in a 4k image.
IMHO the single most important thing digital provides is new ways to see - I'll often direct students to use the threshold filter to discover new lighting shapes in references or indicate planning problems with their value structure.
Completely agree. The hidden structures of an artwork are pretty much invisible with access to some flavor or other of a digital tool.
I believe that Rembrandt would have killed to have the ability to photograph his work and apply a de-saturation in order to see its lightness map. In fact... he did something similar... view his paintings in candle light, which does indeed almost de-saturate his colors.
Likewise, any decent Impressionist would have loved to be able to create a Saturation map using Photoshop's Selective Color adjustment.
I think this was prescient and still worthy of contemplation.
definitely a real concern in art
The way I understand that paragraph is that "aesthetic information" is the aesthetics involved themselves, and I think it's more than agreeable that art at minimum concerns itself a great deal with aesthetics (things looking pretty, organized, orderly disorganized, etc.) - some might even argue it's all aesthetics, or that aesthetics are inalienable or foundational to it. I'd personally argue there's no art without aesthetics.
Let's say I used a custom power saw to carve a statue faster than ever before and more precisely. Would that reduce my influence and my application of taste? No. I would in fact be able to produce a piece faster and have more room for making more attempts.
Neural network based art tools are all giving us the same thing - easier execution. This means greater production and the ability to try most possibilities. The fact that creating art is more accessible to the public means that more creatives can be in the arena, making for more competition.
Any creator grapples with this change over time. Woodworkers of old prefer their techniques to modern power tools, painters prefer physical media, carvers prefer real blocks of marble/whatever. All of these things have modern digital equivalents, but the establishment of existing artists refuse to leave their posts. They hold their ground that the medium is critical to the art.
Art moves and changes slowly because of this human bias against new solutions. Go to any museum of modern art and you'll find that most of it could have been executed as such 20+ years ago. It's just that art takes time to accept a new way of doing something.
But a banana sticked to a wall with some tape did!
I'll stick to the best definition of art that I've heard : "if it gives you an emotion, it is art".
(shitty type systems as well?)
I also want to emphasize the "banana sticked to a wall" complaint is an often right wing stance to devalue art.
Art can be emotional, but not everything that creates emotion is art. In time I think we will work out a better definition of what constitutes art. One that excludes generated images and videos and emphasizes the human connection of artwork.
Second:
One is made by a human for other humans. The other is a randomly recognized pattern built from the stolen art of millions, and has no intended audience (because it itself is incapable of consuming art).
There is something that fits that definition, which is nature. Some actually believe it’s a divine expression and does indeed have an intended audience (us). That’s a weird belief, but your argument is actually quite sound if you believe in God. If you don’t, then your argument falls apart because so much of nature is art, so much so that art is often based on it.
If the Grand Canyon is randomness, yet it appears clearly beautiful to us, and is the source of inspiration for Art, then we can say that this new form of random pattern generator is also another source, one we can take inspiration from.
There will be sticklers that will create a delineation between nature and art, which ultimately is quite arrogant because it will apply one specific characteristic to art, that being art is a specifically human creation.
but that would interrupt my tech bro flow with uncomfortable things I've decided nobody should read. that simply wont do, sorry
Does that make it art? Dunno. Don't care. It makes it interesting which is a more useful category.
I think it's brilliant commentary. And even if you have never heard of NFTs it poses questions about what qualifies a piece of art as unique or an original
and jpegs don't actually have anything to do with NFTs other than being used as representations of them by grifters, ruining a useful technology by poisoning the representation of it in minds like yours because a distributed record of software ownership would threaten the app store monopolies.
ok that's conspiratorial but it would explain it..
Of course, we probably don't want the dystopic parts of society to get more reliable, but the fact is the tech would probably make them so.
I strongly agree, and thank you for spelling it out. It's a point often lost in discussions of both tech and economics, that we need some slack in the system. That's where happiness, love, friendship, compassion, charity, forgiveness, imagination, and all other things good, nice and human, live. Too much efficiency just grinds people to dust.
(That, and creates brittle systems that breaks the first moment reality asserts itself.)
> Apparently it's not uncommon that when a debt collector buys a spreadsheet of unpaid debt, they can't actually prove in court that the debtor actually owes them the debt. You'd think some form of cryptocurrency technology would improve this
At a glance, I think your idea would work. I'm just curious about corner cases alone, and how often they'd happen.
For example, in some cases, I imagine it would actually reveal there is no proof because the debt is bogus. My impression is, no one in the chain is really incentivized to verify whether the debt is legitimate. Creditors outsource that in bulk to collection agencies, agencies might find it easier to try and collect anyway than proactively validate every entry in the spreadsheet, and plenty of debtors will contest real debts anyway. For the first two, the name of the game is minimizing costs; not sure if adding crypto to the mix would help, or just make the process more complicated and expensive.
I also wonder what would happen if, for some reason, a smart contract/NFT was established around a bogus entry. How much harder would it be for the debtor to prove that they don't actually owe the money in question?
Some would probably buy proofless unpaid debt, but it would be almost worthless.
> How much harder would it be for the debtor to prove that they don't actually owe the money in question?
I refer you to the aforementioned dystopia. Even today, if your credit card is used in a transaction involving the physical card and your PIN, it's presumed you agreed to pay.
What are you EVEN talking about.
If you transmit an image to my computer when I browse your website, that image is now saved on my computer in my browser's cache. It is too late for your supposed legal contact at this point, I have already copied your image, at your explicit instruction. Now try to run that through court.
"Your honor, I instructed the defendant's machine to save a copy of my image on his computer, which it did, causing the defendant to have copied my image, thus violating this here legal contract written on a slice of American cheese."
You can already make legal contracts about the use and re-use of art. NFTS, as a method for trying to prevent people from performing actions the internet explicitly requires for them to even be seen in the first place, were, are, and will remain nonsense.
no it does not, as anyone may create a new NFT attached to the same content with different claims
For NFTs "owned" by people in the US, I sure hope you have each and every NTF as a formally registered copyright. IANAL, but it would seem the contract cannot directly affect non-parties, and thus standard copyright law would apply. Registration is required to file a copyright infringement suit.
But that's not the argument the "hurr... it's a banana. stuck to a wall" crowd are really making.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/20/arts/design/cattelan-bana...
Art requires human intention to be art.
As I see it, art is in the eye of the beholder. Splotches of color made by Jackson Pollock and those made by my 3 year old don't differ in their intent (I assume both equally want to express themselves), but in the way that we view the work. I for one don't see any issue with treating a beautiful mountain vista as "a work of art", regardless to whether I believe it was intentionally created by a personified god, or by an RNG in the simulator that's rendering this corner of the universe, or anything in between. I see art.
because a pretty mountain is not art? sorry that's not obvious?
It's obvious to you, because your definition of "art" requires it to be man-made. But you can't use the fact that non-man-made things can't be art to argue that non-man-made things can't be art. It only works on people who already agree.
In particular, if art was so easy to define, we probably wouldn't have philosophical studies such as "Definitions of Art" - https://books.google.ie/books?id=6peJnXr4L5gC
And even the chair&table example isn't that straightforward - https://www.coolthings.com/little-oyster-coffee-table/
> While nature itself is not art, it is a source of artistic inspiration and can be used as a medium or subject in art. Art is typically considered a human creation with intentional aesthetic or expressive purposes, whereas nature exists independently of human creation. [1, 2]
> because your definition of "art" requires it to be man-made.
it's not "my" definition, it's the definition. In the dictionary.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/art
1 : skill acquired by experience, study, or observation "the art of making friends" 2a: a branch of learning: (1): one of the humanities (2)arts plural : liberal arts b archaic : learning, scholarship 3: an occupation requiring knowledge or skill "the art of organ building" 4a: the conscious use of skill and creative imagination especially in the production of aesthetic objects "the art of painting landscapes" also : works so produced "a gallery for modern art" b(1): fine arts (2): one of the fine arts (3) : one of the graphic arts 5aarchaic : a skillful plan b: the quality or state of being artful (see artful sense 2a) 6: decorative or illustrative elements in printed matter
I think it's necessary, but not sufficient. So I kinda like my better:
It's art if (and to the extent of) people generally agree it's art.
Sounds tautological, but it isn't[0].
Of course, not everything is art. There are some aspects typically - but not always - present. Whether something gives you an emotion is one. Whether it has a deeper story behind it is another. Whether it's something that you can bond over with other people, or a shared experience, yet another. But none of those are required to be present. Art is ultimately a consensus opinion.
--
[0] - In fact, most of our civilization is built on ideas that exist only as long as most people expect most other people to believe them. Examples include: money, laws, countries, corporations, even the concept of society itself.
Does Jiro and his sushi constitute an artist and his art? Let's say yes, and let's say most people today agree with this. They're cosmopolitan enough to recognize the sophistication and craft. This definition therefore defines it as "art".
I would say if you told the average Brit living in the UK in the 1950s that there's a guy that's really good at slicing up raw fish, you might get a different average answer.
So I don't think art is dependent on the conclusion viewer, but on the intention of the author. If they arrange rocks just-so, because they enjoy the shadows they make at noon, I think that's art.
That still depends on the conclusion of the viewer, because intent exists only in the heart of the creator. We can guess at it, or choose to trust the creator when they say what their intent was, but we cannot independently see and evaluate it. Then, other people can disagree with us on what the intent was. You say Jiro is is an artist, I say he's just building a fake persona to market his fish-slicing business.
I think there is no quality of "art" that's inherent to the work; I see art as purely social phenomenon.
Stubbing my little toe gives me an emotion, is that "art"? lol
I would suggest that art is a method is communication. One philosophical definition that I've often used is that "it is a selective recreation of reality in accordance with what the artist considers to be essential."
When viewed through the lens of how art might be a useful tool for human survival, it allows us, as rational animals, to communicate highly complex topics in a condensed, straight-to-the-point manner. Morality tales and other stories, paintings, statues, theatrical plays ... all serve to communicate something.
To circle back to computer-generated "art", I would say that if the computer-generated artwork has a human programmer who was trying to communicate something through the software and its output, then I could consider it to be "art." It is not the computer producing the art, it is the human being who is programming or otherwise directing the computer through an intent to communicate something. If you leave a computer alone, and using some kind of random entropy it just so happens to produce an image of something because that's what the random generator landed on, then it's not art. There was no intent to communicate.
And in the example of computers visualizing some natural phenomenon (the article mentioned an oscilloscope as an example), then it is no more "art" than the image projected into the eye from a microscope since there is no recreation. It is, in that context, a tool for observing reality as it exists, rather than a medium of communication intended to express an idea.
Even if it's made by chatgpt? A lot of carbon-chauvinists believe only meatbags can make art.
In what way?
Therefore, unless you grant an autonomous AI personhood it can't create art.
However, one could use AI as a tool to express themselves and that would be art. But that's where I admit the line gets blurred.
While I agree, unfortunately to the majority of people, "Art" simply means "something that makes me feel something". Whether that thing was generated by a human or a machine makes no difference. In my experience most people, when consuming art, hardly think about where it came from/who made it/why they made it, simply on the feelings it evokes with themselves. And as we have seen through outrage algorithms, computers are quite good at figuring out how to create emotional states in humans.
There are many flavors of this I can recall. One is voice acting in anime. I'd read episode discussion threads, and people would keep namedropping and discussing the voices behind the characters. Striked me and continues to strike me as just an extremely odd thing to do. As if these folks would go out of their way to ruin the immersion for themselves. Still, I don't mean to judge: they enjoy themselves whatever way they prefer.
Or recently I had a discussion with a coworker on being a fan of musicians and bands. He brought up an example that really surprised me: "so called fans will stare at you like a deer at headlights when you ask them: oh you're a fan of Linkin Park? what's their drummer called?". Or how there were so and so "cool" stories about some rock n roll musicians. These are beyond weird to me: I like (some of) their music, not them as individuals. I know nothing about them, nor do I really wish to or think I would be able to. (But then I'm also no "fan" of any musician in the sense my colleague described his idea of that: I feel completely uncompelled to be familiar with the entire discography of a band/artist, and especially to be obsessed with one in general.)
But maybe this is a generational difference. In any case, I'd be really hesitant to characterize this as just straight "unfortunate".
There's also a swath of cases where the expression in question is only a little more if even that than just a demonstration of someone's aesthetic or ideological preferences. I'm not sure how much art is in there - if someone were to call those expressions shallow, I'd likely agree. In which case, I'm not sure there's much to find unfortunate on this; it's only as unfortunate as much interest you (can) have in that person.
But if we accept that, there's no need for the creator to be a person - since if you yourself are a person observing the art, the idea will still hold.
While I'd find this notion agreeable, I really don't subscribe to personhood being a requirement on either side of art to begin with. But maybe it's something worthwhile for your consideration.
I think something missing in the article is role of art as a way to communicate meaning. Perhaps it's deliberate, i.e. author wanted to provoke people into talking about that aspect.
Obviously, art is part of the broader culture and it is one of the ways people update the collective unconscious. With computers entering human life, and thus culture, people need to make sense of computers. And "computer art" is a part of it, and it's part of the discussion about originality and individuality, so it definitely should be (if anything should be at all).
(We = humans) We made the tweets. We made the paintings. We wrote stupid things on Reddit (or the smarter things). We photographed nature. We built LLMs. In a way, what LLMs are doing is derivative/product of 'our' (and nature's) work. It's like adding 4 ingredients to the blender, blend it for only a few seconds, and you get variation. If you put 4 similar ingredients and you blend again for the exactly same amount of seconds you will get something similar but not the same.
LLM is a blender :)
https://x.com/CarlCanary/status/1479567776272498693
There are people around who successfully predict new modes of creativity when humans and AI will be working together. Seriously: “working together”. Not: “humans using software”. One such software is called “Botto”. An artist is its inventor.
https://x.com/CarlCanary/status/1480107734087479296
I read, there are machines that take an input text to generate images from it. That’s meant to be surprising. Haven’t programs always been texts? You mean, natural language texts are different? So what? Isn’t there Natural Language Programming?
I've got to say though, I dont think his takes were very good
The styling is not as annoying as the cookie dialogs themselves, though.
Google shot themselves in the foot by transferring the pain of privacy to the user for Google Analytics. No one wants this. It wastes so much time. It’s as if every storefront that previously had open doors got a half door added with a crappy combination lock.
That being said you can make a print on canvas and take a brush to add some unique strokes or play the recording and strum along on a guitar.
or you can automate the direct digital cloning and ask the computer for something original.
AI-generated art can be stunning, but the more I see, the more it feels a bit empty. It often looks great, but there's no emotion behind it.
I'm just surprised that someone writing in 1971 thought that they're sufficiently close to the end of the century to comment on it.
I mean, if you're against new art in the first place then the rest kinda follows from that right? This article is like titling an essay "Against Chelsea" and then halfway subtly dropping that, well, actually, you hate football in general and people should stop playing it.
I think AI art is actually going to make gallery-based individual contemporary art objects more valuable, because they are unique things that cannot be replicated. There are only so many paintings by Picasso, or Kiefer, or Hockney, and even if you could copy them down to the atom, the chain of provenance would still basically make the copies worthless and the originals invaluable. This extends even to smaller contemporary artists that aren't world-famous names. And it also means that digital / computer art is probably never going to sell for much money, at least directly as an art object.
At the end of the day, it's essentially simple supply and demand. AI is commoditizing digital images, but it can't commoditize physical ones (yet, or ever.)
That said, doing a simple prompt into an LLM and calling it "my art" seems disingenuous.
i value and appreciate craft on its own merit. something intentionally well-done by someone who is informed by practice is valuable in at least some capacity. but not all craft is art (obviously, harder to define), or at least, i don't hold all craft-as-art as equal or as personally valuable.
to me the biggest thing that separates art from craft is the intention behind creating or materializing an idea through craft vs simply creating or materializing an object (digital or physical). i can really appreciate your "artist's statement" behind the mastery of craft (mathematics in this case) as a means to an end to convey a greater concept, if that's what you're getting at.
this is entirely personal, but it's why i value certain forms of craft-centric art less than art that places a higher value on concept. i guess it's a value difference between media and message. it's why i kinda can't stand listening to prog rock like Rush or Dream Theater (technically very impressive! and valuable craft as someone who strives to become better at "Music"), but instead tend to prefer things that don't place the craft so prominently compared to other aspects.
again - that's not me knocking Rush or Dream Theater anything like that. extremely talented people doing extremely impressive things. but on my personal barometer (personal! not forced on anyone else), i guess i just tend to find it harder to enjoy than some other types of music.
"There is no need for the production of more works of art [...] Aesthetic information as such is interesting only for the rich and the ruling. [...] Thus, the interest in computers and art should be the investigation of aesthetic information as part of the investigation of communication. This investigation should be directed by the needs of the people. [...] We should be interested in producing a film on, say, the distribution of wealth. Such a film is interesting because of its content; the interest in the content is enhanced by an aesthetically satisfying presentation."
That is: to the author, the purpose of art is simply to enhance the presentation of something whose primary purpose is political.
It may be that the author's position isn't specifically about politics as such: he might say, rather, that art should be subordinate to morals, that making art is only valuable in so far as it furthers some other goal that has value in itself, which might or might not be political. But the specific examples in this article are political.
The author does evidently have some other more specific reasons for being skeptical about "computer art". He says that "the repertoire of results of aesthetic behaviour has not been changed by the use of computers" (which might be true, or might be false now but have been true in 1971, but he offers no evidence or arguments for it). He says that "outsiders from technology" are invading the art world without understanding its political situation and "surrendering to the given 'laws of the market'" rather than rebelling against commercialism as real artists should. He says that technology in general, and computers in particular, worsen "the alienation of the artist from his product". Two of these reasons are also political but do engage with the specifics of "computer art" as such. But I think his main reason is the overarching super-general political one: there should be no computer art, because there should be no art as such, because there should only be anti-capitalist political activism which will sometimes use art as a tool.
So far as I can tell, the guts of this argument -- art, in practice, is driven by the rich and powerful, artists should reject this and focus on serving the greater need to overthrow the system with those rich and powerful people at the top and replace it with something fairer, therefore such-and-such an idea in art-as-such is a distraction -- could be transplanted without loss to any moment in the history of art and any particular artistic idea or technique or movement.
Maybe that or something like it is right, but my bet is that in practice the human race is enriched by having some people in it who create art because they love creating art, for whom other concerns are secondary.
(Having said all of which, so far as I can tell the author is basically correct about "computer art" not having contributed much aesthetically, and if he'd written more about that it could have been very interesting. And he might be correct about technology increasing the separation between artists and what they produce, and about that being a bad thing, and if he'd written more about that it could also have been interesting.)
That has been the default option for large historic periods, when organized religions were the main source of funds. I don't believe the author would appreciate being in that company.
This other guy was the author of the text book when I had to study that subject:
Artists tend to go through stages where maybe they start out interested in it, or find that they have a unique talent, or like the community. Often they get stuck at the "look what I can do" stage, or sell out.
I think of the late Thomas Kinkade in that way, because even though his art is captivating, it doesn't seem to challenge the viewer. It just takes us to his vision at that time. Which feels like the minimum we can ask of art. Then merchandizing took over, and although he ended up successful while enjoying the life he had built, I wonder if some part of him dreamed of starting over free from all that so that he could truly express himself. Scandal and managing a vast network of franchises seemed to overshadow the real work of pushing boundaries, as if he abandoned art for some other purpose that I don't fathom.
Whereas at the opposite end of the spectrum, I think of Van Gogh as the epitome of the starving artist, where talent is irrelevant because no matter how well one performs, tomorrow never comes. There's only humble gratitude for now in the struggle. His paintings of broken figures making due in the squalor haunt me, reminiscent of everyone I know having to work hard every day to survive at a time when we're all growing poorer to feed the insatiable hunger of the ultra rich who feed on the last profits of commodification. Just like it's always been.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bedroom_in_Arles
I keep that image as my desktop background to remind me that everything I've ever done is little more than memory and that the history of my life basically fits in a box. I'll die in obscurity after accomplishing little of any importance, witnessing all of my most heartfelt dreams manifest through the actions of others. Because I spent my life working instead of self-actualizing. Although in the end, maybe they're the same thing.
It doesn't matter to me if art is made in a computer if it says something. But in the vast majority of it, I see mostly derivative work, little more than Flash animation plastered over corporate graphic design. Even video games look exceptional but are just a veneer over mediocre gameplay. For the longest time I couldn't look at them as they approached the uncanny valley of pseudorealism, with their million dollar budgets draining funds away from the countless better games that might have been made.
Now AI is finally negating talent absolutely. The most human contribution will be to write "handmade" somewhere on something that wasn't made by a computer. It's astonishing to think that no matter how powerful AI becomes, it still won't have solved the most basic forms of human suffering on any timescale. Tech will just continue crushing down on all of us with its misaligned incentives. Until art is thought of as a Banksy mural scribbled on the side of a tenement beneath a skyscraper, narrating our spiritual and moral decline.
At least with talent out of the picture, we may see a renewal of the humanities for the sake of love. Perhaps the decline of meritocracy before it devolves into fascism. If we're lucky, a mocking of ego for its hoarding of wealth. When I think of the most inspiring art, I think of all of us, each divine, finding hope in tragedy, poignantly lighting the way out of the darkness of history that's been cast over our eyes by the insufferable winners.
The first has the same aesthetics as stock photography, commercial illustration, and fantasy art. Some of it is spectacular, but it's not imaginative in any original sense.
The second can get... interesting.
Really? Was art finished in 1971?
These sort of very dated articles by people misunderstanding history can be funny, but this particular claim stands out as unusually weird.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_L...
Not that I think anyone much bought the thesis at the time either.
It seems to be a recurring idea that the current state must surely be the final culmination of something. Like us being the end product of evolution.
The artistic process is complicated, and which role a person plays in relation to the creation of a piece of artwork varies. Some people are the actual workers who go about creating the thing. Some are collaborators who help out the worker with small pieces of the artwork. Others are simple curators who bring people together.
Then you have those who commission an art piece, and it's what their role in this process is that I find myself conflicted on--are they deserving the title of artist because they funded it's creation, or had the initial idea for the piece? If your answer is yes--that they are considered an artist for commissioning a piece, then I think you can argue that a person who uses an AI model to generate art is actually creating art.
But if your answer is no--that simply having an idea and the means to bring it about (through money, or an AI model that was trained off the works of millions of artists without their consent), then I think you have a basis to argue that simply prompting these models to generate art, is not enough to constitute art. The piece wasn't generated by a human, and the prompt given to the model wasn't from someone who actually contributes to the creation of the art piece, therefor the result is not art.
Now what if someone first prompts a model to generate an image, and then spends a lot of time tweaking said image in Photoshop--are they still only a commissioner at that point? Well I suppose they aren't. But what about repeatedly prompting an AI until it gives you a close enough replica of what you imagined? Is this process practically the same touching up the piece yourself? I'd argue no, and I'd say this is simply the role of a commissioner telling the worker they're off the mark, and that the worker needs to start over.
Anyways that is a lot of text, but I think my point is this--analyzing the role a person plays while prompting an LLM can help inform if the output of the model is actually art.